


01:04am

by archekoeln



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Animal Death, Gen, Nathalie Sancoeur-centric, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:15:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26487766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archekoeln/pseuds/archekoeln
Summary: How dare they feel something.How dare she not.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	01:04am

**Author's Note:**

> this is a vent fic. tw animal death.
> 
> because i can't apparently write anything without projecting on nathalie. huh.

Maybe if she takes it out of the box, it’ll live. Something like it, small and fragile, crushed easily if she pushes her finger even _just a little bit,_ ought to be taken care of properly.

But Nathalie doesn’t know how to. She’s never done this before.

She watches the slow rise and fall of the kitten’s chest, breathing strained and slowly, _slowly,_ ticking away. She counts the seconds in her head, _twenty, thirty, forty,_ and then the minutes, _two, for, six,_ breathing hard along with it.

It’s obvious. It’s dying.

She has never cried for her father when he died years ago. On the cusp of adulthood, barely even, she remembers standing with her mother and her siblings, in front of his casket. Nathalie grew in his shadow; grew to love his loud voice and his assertive drive to succeed; grew to be his favorite— to follow, to be him.

But then he died, and not once did she cry for him.

Not when they pulled the plug, nor when they watched him gather crowds. Not when his casket was full of flowers and a body unrecognizable to her. Not when her mother wailed in the background.

Nathalie heard the whispers back then. _Why isn’t she crying? Isn’t she sad? Isn’t she supposed to cry?_

Her father, who towered over her, often told her to smile. She never did. Eldest child, Christmas in her name, never smiled, never cried; even when the world said she should, even when doves flew overhead (from a party three blocks away), as they lowered the casket, as they said their final goodbyes.

_How dare they celebrate. How dare they be happy._

_How dare they feel something._

_How dare she not._

The kitten is on her lap now, on a brown towelette, resting his head over bunched cotton. It stirs, moving around. He mewls a pathetic sound and she… she watches. Something isn’t right.

She watches and she knows, _something is not right._

It mewls again, for a mother who is dead and Nathalie _wants_ to be that mother but she can’t provide it what it needs and _god,_ why is nursing a newborn _hard._ This animal can’t live on its own and can’t live without its mother _and she_ **_isn’t_ ** _in the basement of this godforsaken house, rotting in her cage made out of glass._

Her chest hurts as she watches. It stings, like roses with its thorns furled and piercing through her skin. Like that stupid fictional disease Adrien keeps on insisting, on telling her— apart from everything else he tells her, like his studies and his friends and his life that she already knows to a t. 

He’s growing up and she knows everything about him (not really, but she thinks she does), and isn’t that the problem? Isn’t that the thing? She’s here and the mother isn’t and she knows, deep in her gut, swimming with the guilt and the shame and the overbearing need to cry, that she isn’t the mother. Never will be.

Being reminded (again and again) of Adrien causes her to tear up. It’s so sudden too, when her eyes are filled up with thick, fat tears that roll down her cheeks. They don’t stop and soon, she is sniffling and wailing and the tears are dropping fast, splashing on the towelette and the kitten still rolling and waiting. She makes out the blurry outline through her tears and her fingers automatically rub circles on its head, trying desperately to curb her emotions but failing because, well, _you’re already crying, aren’t you?_

Nathalie hates this. She’s… isn’t she, isn’t she supposed to be heartless? _Sancoeur. Sans coeur. Without heart. Heartless._ Her father left his name and here she is, _here it is,_ clinging to her like an insistent parasite.

She didn’t cry for her father. She doesn’t cry for most things anyway, because _sans coeur,_ because _heartless._

But right here, right now, at this very moment, she’s crying out for a little kitten, helpless and dying.

And she doesn’t even know or wonder why.

(Nathalie leaves it in the box. Tries to sleep.

She doesn’t check it in the morning anymore.)


End file.
